Center for Teaching, Learning and Research

CTLR Pedagogy Series—Tech for the Teaching Toolkit
Presenters: Ryan Clement, Research Librarian and Kristy Golubiewski-Davis, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts

Join us on Thursday, March 23rd from 12:30-1:30 for our next Behind the Scenes presentation. Professors of Psychology Marcia Collaer (Middlebury College) and Anthony Richardson (Saint Michael’s College) will present their work exploring the development of body ownership as assessed in the virtual world. Their work extends investigations of the rubber hand illusion into digital space. The traditional rubber hand illusion explores sensory and perceptual factors that give rise to a sense of ‘body ownership’ that can develop for an inanimate object (e.g., a rubber hand/arm).

Sam Liebhaber has been working on converting his existing Mahri Poetry Archive from a WordPress site to Scalar, which provides a platform for non-linear content exploration. The project is under contract to be published by Stanford University Press. The October 25th,12:15-1:30 Behind the Scenes will feature Sam and his Summer Research Assistant, Jeff Holland ’19, discussing the work done to create the project.

Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP at go.middlebury.edu/DLARSVP

Join us on Wednesday, January 25th from 12:15-1:30 for our next Behind the scenes presentation. Caitlin will present new work visualizing the effects of Texas HB-2, a law that caused more than half of Texas’ abortion clinics to close their doors in late 2013. Working with Middlebury students Anna Cerf and Birgitta Cheng, Caitlin has tracked and visualized the closures of abortion clinics across Texas. She combines this information with data on health outcomes to estimate how decreasing access to abortion services has impacted women’s health.

Once again the Annual Writing & Teaching Retreat will take place at the Mountain Top Inn, Chittendent, VT. Watch for updates and registration information in late spring.

Andrew Flowers, former Quantitative Editor and Economics Writer for FiveThirtyEight.com, will profile six types of data journalism stories. Several stories will serve as examples, such as p-hacking in nutrition studies, police officer shootings, Uber’s effect on taxis, and what local characteristics explain Donald Trump’s electoral victory.

Sponsored by: Middlebury Mathematics, Political Science, Economics, and CTLR. 

Some of history’s most creative and accomplished scientists, writers, and artists produced great works while spending far fewer hours “working” than we would expect. Other famous figures led governments, built commercial empires, won Nobel prizes, or developed medical breakthroughs while also having second lives as authors, explorers, and athletes. How did they do it? In this talk I argue that rest played an under-appreciated but critical role in making people more creative and successful.

Computers, smartphones, and the Internet all promised to make us smarter, more connected, and more productive; but all too often living with them leaves us feeling busier, more distracted, and more unfocused. Responses to this have ranged from negative (technologies are dehumanizing and antisocial) to positive (computers are rewiring our brains to read status updates rather than Steinbeck) to fatalistic (progress is unstoppable). In this talk, I present an alternative view. Humans have used technologies to extend our minds and augment our abilities for hundreds of millennia.